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Friday, February 6, 2015

Q&A with Charles and Caroline Todd

Charles and Caroline Todd, a mother-son team who write under the name Charles Todd, are the authors of the new mystery A Fine Summer's Day, the latest in their Ian Rutledge series. Their many other novels also include the Bess Crawford series. They live on the East Coast of the United States.

Q: How did you come up with
your character Ian Rutledge?

A: When we decided to write
about the Great War, we realized that our character had to be an Englishman rather
than an American. The thinking was, since America was involved in the actual
fighting for less than six months, we hadn’t suffered as Britain had done, we
couldn’t “speak” for the period as clearly.

And we wanted several things
from Rutledge himself. First a career that he could come home at the Yard, not
the Met or county police, the intelligence and experience to solve crimes on
his own without modern forensics, which were in their infancy then, and to be
the kind of man who would fight his own battles with PTSD and struggle to deal
with four years in the trenches.

He must speak too for all
those who had gone to France in hope of fame and glory, and speak as well for
those who had not come home. And the person who came into being has more than
fulfilled our expectations of him—he’s someone we’ve come to care about quite
deeply.

Q: Why did you decide to set
the new mystery, A Fine Summer's Day, in 1914?

A: We’d written sixteen books
about Rutledge the man who had survived the Great War and come home to a very
different world in 1919. And we were increasingly curious about what he might
have been like in 1914 before the war cast a shadow over Britain and
Europe.

We thought we knew how the
war had changed him, but as we wrote this prequel, exploring the man and his
times, we were often surprised by what we didn’t know we knew about him! It
will be interesting to see how Rutledge fans take this book, but for us it was
an experience and a challenge.

If you’ve never read this
series, try A Fine Summer's Day, and then read A Test of Wills, the 1919 story
of Rutledge’s return.If you’ve read
Test, and are now enjoying A Fine Summer's Day, you will see this man in a very
different and powerful light. We made a point not to reread Test ourselves,
until we had finished Day, and it was an amazing journey.

The next Rutledge of course
takes us back to the point where we left him after Hunting Shadows, and we’re
well into it.

Q: What kind of research do
you do for your novels?

A: Everybody does research of
some kind, but since we jumped into a time not our own, a country not our own,
and even a language not our own, we have to do a great deal of research.

About the period, about the
war, about the countryside, about France, about what people wore and felt and
thought, and even about the food they ate or the cars they were just starting to
drive.

Fortunately we both love
doing research, and we try to use sources contemporary to the period so we know
what they knew. It’s amazing to find an old postcard depicting a place you’re
deciding to write about: there’s the main street on a winter’s day, or a
village square as it was then.Or to
find a description in someone’s memoirs or to see a photograph of a lorry or a woman’s
hat or the way sheep were shorn.

But the most important
research takes us to England, because walking around in the village we are to
use, finding its past roots, talking to people who have lived there, listening
to how they express themselves and what is important to them can’t be found in
a book or on line.

Q: Do you generally know how
your books will end before you start writing, or do you make changes as you go
along?

A: We never know who did it
or why. From page one we are following our characters through the story,
listening to what they have to say, what secrets they are trying to hide, what
Rutledge can pry out of them, and what their interactions are with other
characters, and we figure out who did it and why about the same time Rutledge
does. It’s a way also to keep the book fresh, rather telling the same story in
18 different ways.

We sort of had to figure out
how to collaborate, and the system of doing everything together, and letting
our characters loose has really worked.Not every author does it that way, of course—there are as many “ways to
write” as there are writers. What works for YOU is the always the best
approach.

Q: What are you working on
now?

A: We’ve just turned in the
next Bess Crawford—end of December—and we’re busy with the production stages of
that. Line edits, copy edits, cover art, and so on.

The title is A Pattern of Lies, and Bess is facing an unusual situation where her help might change a
man’s fate. If you are on trial for murder, and all the evidence is against
you, sifting through a pattern of lies and whispers just might finally get at
the truth.

And we’ve begun the new
Rutledge, which seems to be taking place in Cornwall, rather than Wales, as we
had expected it to. No title yet, early days, but one of the things we’ve
really enjoyed is switching from Bess for one part of the year to Rutledge for
another. And we’ve promised several short stories, so we’re working on them as
well.

Q: Anything else we should
know?

A: We’ve just had a wonderful
tour through six states, and met the most terrific people. We were interviewed
by PBS stations and radio stations, met with book clubs, saw some absolutely
marvelous bookstores, and had a great time.

It’s tiring, doing all that
traveling, but the chance to walk into a bookstore we have visited before or
are just coming to for the first time, is really what it’s all about. You stand
up before a group and talk about your books—and then they ask questions and you
learn how they feel about the characters or the setting or the plot. Since you
write in a room by yourself, this is important to do.

We also have to admit that we
found some books to buy as well. Each independent bookstore is an adventure,
different tastes, different books on the shelves, different opportunities. So
we make the most of it.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).